Distributed Spam Detection

A reader writes "There's an interesting project at SourceForge, called, "Vipul's Razor", that uses a gnutella like system to let users exchange spam "signatures" to filter spam. I work at an ISP in Ottawa, we have been using it for last two weeks to stop bulk of spam coming to our POP3 accounts. More impressively, it hasn't tagged any valid mail as spam yet. Here's the scoop from its webpage: "Vipul's Razor is a distributed, collaborative, spam detection and filtering network. Razor establishes a distributed and constantly updating catalogue of spam in propagation. This catalogue is used by clients to filter out known spam. On receiving a spam, a Razor Reporting Agent (run by an end-user or a troll box) calculates and submits a 20-character unique identification of the spam (a SHA Digest) to its closest Razor Catalogue Server. The Catalogue Server echos this signature to other trusted servers after storing it in its database. Prior to manual processing or transport-level reception, Razor Filtering Agents (end-users and MTAs) check their incoming mail against a Catalogue Server and filter out or deny transport in case of a signature match."" Cool idea. I'm up around 80% spam a day on my main mail account. Might be worth a try.

Re:Anyone know where these people live?

[Pr0n K1ng]

I believe that Nazi timothy is doing something like this. Check his journal for more info.

Re:Great use of p2p

[Anonymous Coward]

P2PQ [p2pq.net] is a distributed question/answer network.

Some positivism and less bitching please...

[tcc]

Well at least it *WILL* filter some of the bad content while leaving the good one clean, right now I receive 20 mails a day of spam in my hotmail inbox and the hotmail filter killed *VALID* messages! they keep junk for 2 weeks, I found that out 3 months later because my girlfriend posts would never reach me for the last few days.. and she's far from being a spammer.

There's not perfect solution for spam (aside from killing every single individuals that dare spamming people, which unfortunately is still illegal :) ).

Legislation is too busy removing our civil rights right now than to make our lives better (as they should do). So right now, I'd say, ANY technology helping us to reduce spam should be welcomed and helped in a productive way instead of bashing on it without even giving it a try. It's an open project and it means that if you can contribute in a POSITIVE way, you should. Else, people, please don't discourage programmers working on something that could eventually come out as being a very good solution.

OH NO!!

[evilpaul13]

I'll never get another "funny email" from my Mom again!

List of server-based spam filter systems

[tgeller]

A canonical list of server-based spam filtering systems [spamcon.org] is on the SpamCon Foundation site, along with other sysadmin resources [spamcon.org].

Re:Great use of p2p -- Wont work.

[linzeal]

I get a lot of email for Ass Hole, Fuck You, Die Spammer, and other such people I've never heard of.